Why do people bother with open source?
bunkum.us
bunkum.us
My contributions, feeble as they may feel as a single contributor, is my way of making sure I'm not just taking from the world, but at least trying to give back. A payment of sorts. Open source may not generally demand such payment, but by Kant's imperative, if everybody takes and nobody contributes, there will soon be nothing to take from, so I really ought to try my best to contribute reasonably as well, even just in the form of reproducible bug reports, documentation updates, or a tiny improvement here and a tiny improvement there.
For me, it’s this. So many useful tools and projects helped me when I was getting started that I feel obliged to give back for life. If my abilities came from reading tutorials, books, open source code, etc then shouldn’t I give back? Must everything be for profits? My employer owns me from 9-5 but not my side projects. I can explore other areas of computing with those and share my findings with others. Whether or not you find it useful. I think the idea that if you create a successful open source project, you’re more employable is a farce. You’ll just be more busy. But it depends on the gravity of the project I guess.
From the other side, I look for open source projects from candidates to see if they know how to code. I look at the history and logs, the diffs, and changes. If they don’t have any code out there, I force them into a coding challenge. If you do have code out there, you don’t have to take the challenge. (Fair hiring practice I say)
Maybe it is his condescending words "why do people bother...", or that we are "working for free" with the implication being that we're suckers for doing it.
I think it bugs me because the author seems to disdain open source contributors. But why?
Some people just have a zero-sum mentality.
If it is your belief that the only way you can benefit is by taking something from someone else, then yeah, open source doesn't make sense.
1. I want to write a cool program, but I am painfully aware that it would make a lousy business. Why not toss it up on GitHub?
2. My employer wants to write a useful program that we need, but is too low-level to fit into our commercial offerings. And by itself, the program wouldn't help anyone compete with us. So rather than splitting our sales team's focus with a product that doesn't fit into our strategy, we publish it on GitHub with a short manual.
I've absolutely gotten jobs and consulting gigs from people interested in my projects. They function as a portfolio.
And it's not like releasing projects as open source imposes any particular burden on me. I am absolutely willing to close a feature request with a note that says, "This is an excellent idea! But realistically, I will not get the time to implement in the next 5 years." And then I can finish with either "I would review a clean PR with tests," or "Even if someone sent me a PR, I would be unlikely to merge it, because it would add maintenance overhead." Once you learn to say no, it gets easier. Or if the requestor is obviously making a lot of money using my software, I could offer consulting services.
(Also, for many types of open source programs, it helps not to ship Windows binaries. This reduces support costs.)
This seems to miss that those same creative people in other fields very commonly give away their work for free. It's basically one of the staple means to actually surviving as an artist.
Digital artists and illustrators distribute their work for free and commonly allow it to be used free of charge for non commercial purposes. The same goes for musicians.
Freely distributing your work is basically how you survive as an artist. It builds you a brand (a "style") and a community of fans who end up networking your works for you. That's the underlying strategy for getting commissions as a digital artist nowadays.
The difference with open source software is that software developers tend to use formal licenses rather than informal "ask me first but I'll probably say okay" licenses. And of the licenses that open source devs tend to use, plenty of them use copyleft licenses that fill essentially the same "okay for non commercial" condition (but instead of com vs non-com it's closed vs open source).
So I think the bigger question should be "Why don't more open source developers use copyleft licenses when possible?". That question probably highlights the bigger difference between software developers and other creatives.
Artists that I've spoken to (and I've spoken to many) don't tend to understand copyright either. The more naïve ones believe that copyright will protect them from plagiarism; of course it's not that simple in practice. Yet, the cultural norms among artists today go back centuries before computers existed, and before modern copyright laws too. That seems to make it much harder for 'open culture' licences like Creative Commons to get a foothold, although online sites like Flickr have certainly contributed to collecting a sizeable corpus of freely-licenced art.
If the concept of Free Software had been conceived after the widespread use of the World Wide Web rather than before it, I don't think that even the comparative openness of the Web would have been enough to make FOSS catch on.
To me, that begs the question: does FOSS actually need to exist? After all, art and music continues to survive and thrive without free licensing? But when I ponder that question, I'm glad FOSS does exist. We programmers don't, by and large, have to cope with record labels and licensing agencies taking successively larger cuts from the sale of our work, and those who program professionally tend to be compensated considerably more generously than our counterparts in the creative arts.
Most importantly: we FOSS developers are able to share our own work and take advantage of others' with complete certainty and legality. No 'grey areas' about copying when the original author or artist goes AWOL (it's actually not a grey area; it's simply prohibited). No 'non-commercial use only' causing legal headaches for non-profit and charitable ventures. No Digital Rights Management - I don't need to explain that relief here!
So all in all, I get what the blog post's author is trying to say, but I think he's just taking the joy of FOSS for granted. Programming would be a much more competitive, less friendly world if it were exclusively proprietary and commercial, and would be exploited more - not less - if it were as ad-hoc and improvised an industry as in the creative arts.
I don't follow this reasoning. It's not like it's illegal to sell software or whatever. You can create and sell software, libraries, services and whatnot. There must be something else about open source, not fully captured by this article.
This phenomena is surprising for me as well, as it's not observed with other fields. I gave some thought about it, but I still have no idea why is it so wide-spread with programming, but not with other areas. It must be something about zero-cost copy of the software, but I struggle to draw a connection.
> The types of desires that motivate open-source developers are the same as those of creative people in other fields
Yes, that does seem to be true! However, he draws the conclusion exactly backwards: for most creative people, it is the desire to create which is paramount, but the tedious necessity of making a living leads to a lot of aesthetic compromise and time wasted on business overhead, which would all be joyfully jettisoned if there were some other way of meeting one's material needs.
If artists could satisfy that desire to create without having to worry about making money, most artists would probably not bother to charge for their work at all, because charging money introduces a whole layer of accounting and taxes and promotion and (oh my god, just kill me now) process which purely distracts from the goal of making art.
For me, the fascination and satisfaction of creating software came long before any prospect of making a living at it. For most of my career, I also wrote code in my free time, to give away, for the sheer joy of it. It is inherently satisfying to make something beautiful which liberates people from repetitive drudgery.
Running a business is tedious and time-consuming. The amount of money I could make selling the kinds of things I like to work on would be trivial, and the kind of work I would have to do in order to make enough money to justify the side-project would be... well, I already have a job! Why would I want a second, worse job on top? It's not worth the hassle. I'd rather spend my free time contributing to the global commons and feeling good about it.
Says who?
This is very much an unsubstantiated claim - no reasoning behind it and the naive assumption that everyone agrees with him.
There are many of us who feel strongly about preserving the principles of free-as-in-freedom software and the principles of Open Source software. We hold one another's feet to the fire despite some commercial preferences.
The quality level of the work is top notch. I consider myself very fortunate that I get to work with some of the best software developers in the world.
> The idea that prospective employers will look at open source contributions to evaluate job applicants is now, thankfully, understood as pernicious.
Ad populum - please back up this claim.
And for hobbyists, most of their code is not worth selling, they are just writing stuff for their own needs and they don't want to spend the effort making a commercial product. So, open source it goes. And if it becomes successful one day, it may still be worth it and you may gain contribution and fame, or maybe not, but you wouldn't have gained anything by keeping that code to yourself either.
Some do it for pure generosity, but it is, I think, a minority. Most either don't care, or it is part of a business plan. Being able to use GPL code can also be a motivation.
(Though you do get to deal with people trying to strong arm you into improvements or extra work you don't want to do.)
“According to Henry P. Macomber's paper "Glimpses of the Human Side of Sir Isaac Newton," the great scientist worked with secretary Humphrey Newton during one of the busier periods of his life. Per The Newton Project, William Stukeley said he only witnessed only one laugh from the genius. It came about because Isaac had loaned an acquaintance a copy of "Euclid" and later asked them their thoughts on the book. The friend responded by asking why studying such things would ever be of any help to them, "upon which," wrote William Stukeley in a letter to Richard Mead, "Sir Isaac was very merry."”
Read More: https://www.grunge.com/639460/the-only-two-times-isaac-newto...
https://github.com/clarkmcc/ngraph
I added prebuilt binaries as part of the CI process for others like simdsim
Made a fork of transformers.js to make it work with bun (also some fixes for bun, and another on the way).
These things add up.
I made a bit of money from it, but ultimately the support ate up all my time, and it was not worth it in the end.
These days I just open source my code. I still love writing it and I get great pleasure to see others getting value from it. I earn enough in my day job that I don't want to turn the things I do for fun into another job.
The anti-capitalist bit is not true. All the major open source licenses allow commercial use. Open source (especially copyleft) is encourages free markets because it makes it harder to erect barrier to entry or lock customers in.
I do not get why it is pernicious for employers to look at open source contributions either.
My understanding was that is the definition, at least according to OSI [0]:
> 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
People should be able to have other interests besides code and still have a livelihood.
An important secondary consideration is paying it forward.
Similarly, I am skeptical that experienced software engineers see open source contributions as being a tacit employment application. The reality is that many of the best engineers have significant restrictions on their ability to contribute to open source and employers know this.
I think it is legitimate to point out the reality that external contributions are typically non-existent and that toxic entitlement by users is unfortunately common. In this regard, it is often a thankless and sometimes negative experience for most people. But people engage in many thankless and often unrewarding tasks outside of software because they still think it is worth doing.
I love it! One for the book of quotations.
But outside of these three positions - what do people mean?
Another possible alternative is being a market socialist (wanting an economy that's basically all worker owned co-ops).
OK. I hadn't considered that option. I guess I'm interested to understand the middle ground between "centralized state ownership" and "no state but somehow it doesn't turn into hellscape of warlords and bandits".
Does this model generally allow private property but exclude "the means of production" etc?
There's definitely a Marxist flavor to this meaning, though I don't think you have to be a tankie to use it that way.
What makes anything intellectual property really?
(Unless it's literally personal property, such as a diary contents.) Renumeration is one thing, property another.
Now the other types of property are:
- Personal property: The definitions differ somewhat. In capitalist legal systems it refers to moveable or non-real property as it is more or less subsumed by private property but in general political/economic theory it refers to your personal things not used for industry. Things like your toiletries and the things the average person keeps in their house. i.e. consumer products and the like. To a lesser extent things like cars or houses. But notably not things like equipment for machining, farming, metalworking, etc.
- Public property: Things owned communally or by the government with explicit dedication to use by the public.
- Common property or collective property: Things owned by the collective that uses them. i.e. The factory and the machines being collectively owned by the workers who work the factory.
And out of the different types of properties the question is who holds which rights. The three types of rights are usus (use), fructus (derive profit/production), and abusus (to abuse, take away, damage, or destroy). In personal and private property the owner holds all three rights and the ability to provide those rights to others (however for personal property the fructus rights are pretty limited given the nature of the items). In the other types of property generally abusus rights are held either by the state or only granted by collective decision making. And some may also limit fructus rights as well.
Types of property that permit usus and fructus are called usufructs. These are things that exist publicly or collectively that you may freely use and derive profit from as long as you don't abuse them and if you damage them you repair/replace them.
So anti-capitalists dislike private property as the dominant form of ownership and instead want to place limits on how much private property any one source of capital (i.e. a capitalist) can hold.
On the less extreme end this means strong anti-trust protections and enforcing worker ownership (often via a union and voting stocks) for orgs larger than a certain size.
On the more extreme end is eliminating private property all together and requiring that any equipment that is solely intended for it's fructus rights to be considered public, common, or collective property.
And you'll note here that the market isn't mentioned at all. Many types of anti-capitalist systems are pro-regulated market or even in many cases pro-free-market.
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Also just a side note but at least when discussing leftist ideas, utopian actually refers to a specific type of pre-marx socialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopian_socialism
I mean I'm a socialist and I agree. If you have the ability to sell your software you 100% should and you should reap the rewards for the labor you put in. Point being that just because someone is pro-market doesn't mean they aren't also anti-capitalist.
Capitalism would mean investors putting in money early and getting an ownership stake and payouts later.
Just like with "socialism", most discussions about "capitalism" are actually people with different definitions talking past each other. I'd say the important issue in economics is monopoly vs anti-monopoly not "capitalism" vs "socialism" and free software is definitely on the side of anti-monopoly.
Anyway, mixed economy all the way imho. Capitalism for small stuff, dirigism in natural monopolies.
We are living in the "more free" future (it was never anti-capitalist) that free software built, and it spans most "modes of computing", dominating some. The thing that's specific to one mode of computing is having no practical alternative to an exploitative, consumer-hostile, proprietary walled garden. That's specific to mobile computing, and it's not some inevitable consequence of capitalism, only of monopoly power and weak regulation.
Speak for yourself.
Luckily for the pwned, not everyone is a corps sellout...